


the uncle must die

by blueparacosm



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Angst, Crime, Death, Eating Disorders, F/M, Humor, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Murder, Recreational Drug Use, Religion, Revenge, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-12-28
Packaged: 2019-08-25 20:36:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16667866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueparacosm/pseuds/blueparacosm
Summary: In 1993, three boys from St. Joseph's Preparatory and a girl from Notre Dame High School in Philadelphia went missing. In 1993, a Catholic weed dealer, a bug-eating basketcase, a rich psychopath, and a lonely girl made of metal set out to kill a man.





	1. chapter one

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings through this entire work for: implied and referenced rape, graphic violence and death, homophobia, religion and blasphemy, strong language, drug abuse, disordered eating, sexual references, and canon-typical offensive humor.

   Charlie Kelly only huffed glue in the third bathroom stall in the men's room on the first floor, Tuesdays and Thursdays. When he turned fifteen he started huffing on Wednesdays, Fridays, and also all the other days and also in every bathroom stall and then in the janitor's closet on meatloaf Mondays when pants and belt buckles were hitting the floor inside all four stalls. When he turned sixteen a cigarette fell out of his pocket along with a bottle of fish oil vitamins that he thought might get him high and his green eyes doubled in size as the skin beneath them really started to droop. When he turned seventeen he stopped showing up for lunch.

    "I don't know," Mac says, swirling a fry around in a smear of ketchup on styrofoam and frowning like a fish. "Maybe he's worried about graduating."

   There are twenty-four tables in the Saint Joseph's Preparatory School cafeteria, and the worst weed dealer in all of Philadelphia has garnered enough respect to clear one out for himself and his best friend Charlie, write-in nominee for class president motivated by a popular need of the student body's to piss off the shitdick principal, and always the quickest to eat earthworms in the courtyard. Mac, the scholarship kid with the straight D's report card, the greased-back snitchmouth drinking alone on the back porch at house parties he wasn't invited to, knew the junior class of St. Joseph's was always clawing to claim a blue circle seat at the cool kids' table, but he likes to keep his social circle tight-knit.

   If only his social circle hadn't started spending every lunch period snorting something up its nose over the men's room sink.

   "He's not worried about graduating, trust me," says snitchmouth's friend, the tall rich kid Mac smokes out under the bleachers after football games. His name is Dennis, and Mac thinks if he were another guy, he'd quite like to be Dennis, or at least have his handsome face.

   "His mom's sticking him in the special ed class next year," he says, and Mac scratches behind his ear, trying to act like it doesn't bother him that Dennis won't sit down, only leans against the edge of the table and mumbles out of the corner of his mouth. The other rich kids couldn't give less of a shit who Dennis talks to because they don't even like him, but Mac would never say so and pretends to respect the mission because he, on the other hand, _does_ like Dennis.

   "You're supposed to call it aided education," Mac corrects, but acquiesces with a sigh. "I don't know what his problem is. I guess he just likes getting high, can you blame him?"

   Dennis quirks a perfectly-plucked brow and gives Mac a corrupt kind of smile that makes his stomach do acrobatics. Dennis, with his curly hair like sand and long black eyelashes that leave coal flakes on his cheeks sometimes, mascara crumbling with all the eye-batting he does at big-boobed girls who probably don't like him either. Mac thinks Dennis is a little gay but would never say so and certainly hopes he isn't, or else he'll go to Hell and burn for all of eternity and that would be a real inconvenience for Mac, what with his being in Heaven and all.

   "No, I can't blame him. In fact I'll bring over some rolling papers tonight. Haven't had a doobie in a while."

   Mac thinks that's a funny way of asking to mooch off a friend's weed for the fourth time this month but would never say so. "Doobie, bro?" he repeats, lips peeling back in the beginnings of a laugh. Dennis only frowns, ears turning pink as he shoves off the table and saunters back over to where Adriano Calvanese and his shiny moneybag goons are probably talking about caviar and expensive liquor and trips to Europe. Dennis throws his head back and laughs at something stupid ugly bigheaded Adriano says, and Mac's milk carton shrinks into a crumpled, sticky handful of cardboard in his palm. Thankfully, the other eight seats at his table are empty, so no one sees him lose his cool.

   Damn, he misses Charlie.

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   "Hot," Dennis lauds in a breath of smoke, and lazily passes the joint. There was enough weed to roll two, but Mac thinks Dennis likes sharing the one, and neither of them said anything about it. Mac watches the woman on the television caress her retro microphone oh-so-sensually and tilt her face under the stream of some artificial waterfall and wonders if it's gay to put his lips in the same place as Dennis did. He turns the joint over so it isn't quite like kissing.

   "Who is she?" he asks, and Dennis punches him in the arm.

   "Madonna, you uncultured pig," he says, snatching the joint back. "She's the Queen of Pop."

   Mac thinks Dennis looks kind of handsome, rumpled uniform tie hanging limply round his shoulders, staring half-lidded at the television and lit by streams of cobalt blue and flashes of pearl white while they sit slumped over on the floor with their heads against the wooden end-board of Mac's bed. "I'm anti-monarchy," Mac mumbles, head lolling towards Dennis. "I'm an American."

   Dennis tears his gaze from the Queen, high as kite, and his blue, blue, blue eyes flicker down to Mac's chapped lips. "You're so fucking stupid," he says, leaning close and breathing a slow, warm cloud over Mac's nose, his mouth. They watched some teens shotgun in a movie once; that's where people breathe smoke into each other's mouths and it's kind of like kissing but not really. It seems weird, but Mac wouldn't mind trying it, kind of like eating clams or doing anal.

   Just when they're maybe a little too close, just maybe a little, the bedroom door creaks open and Mac scrambles backward like a kid caught smoking weed and kissing boys, big brown eyes wide as saucers. Dennis only leans slowly back into Madonkey Whoever-watching position, taking another drag.

   "Hey," says the person in the doorway, and comes a little closer so the singing lady's bright blue lights wash over them too. Their shoulders are hiked up as high as their squeaky voice and they carry in an odor more familiar than family, a stench kind of like what Mac imagines owl pellets would smell like. He likes owls, though, and Charlie can't help it. His mom gave him baths until he was thirteen.

   "Charles," Dennis greets, offering the joint. Charlie rushes forward into the room and takes it, hollowing his cheeks around it and sucking in too much, even for him. Between Charlie's coughs, Mac gathers his bearings.

   "What are you doing here, man? I thought you said you were busy tonight," he asks, and Dennis sighs happily as the MTV channel flickers over to the image of a faceless, undressed woman swaying her hips under a length of blue silk, a sensual, growling male voice singing freak me baby freak me baby freak me baby until Mac gets sick and tired of it. He tries to focus on Charlie and not his warming face at the sight of Dennis grinding exaggeratedly up against the air.

   "Your- uh, your mom, she let me in," Charlie says instead of an answer, wringing his hands. That's what they like to say, "your mom let me in" instead of "I just opened the door and came inside on my own because your mom hasn't gotten out of her chair for more than a pack of smokes or to take a piss in thirty years and hasn't said a word in forty" would be too forward. "Hey man, do you have, like, anything stronger?" he says, and Dennis jerks the joint away from him before Charlie can suck the whole thing down his bobbing throat.

   Their friend looks rather worse for wear, dark circles under his eyes, hair and clothes disheveled, hands trembling by his sides. Charlie always kind of looks fucked up taking into consideration the fact that he's inhaled the equivalent of a spray paint factory over the course of his young life, but something about him tonight looks... wrong. Less bouncing on his toes, more shaking like a leaf.

   "What," Mac says with knitted brows, "like crack?"

   "I've always wanted to try crack," Dennis says dreamily, eyeing the TV with a bleary stare.

   "No," Charlie sighs, "I just, like, you got any glue?"

   "What's your deal, man?" Mac snaps. "You just disappear all the time now, and then show up at my house looking for drugs? Weren't you supposed to be seeing a movie with your uncle tonight?"

   And then Charlie bursts into tears.

   Mac's seen him cry before, of course he has. They've been friends their whole lives, and little Charlie is nothing short of volatile, if not explosive. He cries during sad music videos, cries when he's just super high, cries when worms dry up in the sun. But never like this.

   Never, ever like this.

   "Woah, man," Mac says in alarm, jumping to his feet to approach the unfamiliar creature. Charlie scrambles backward and throws himself against the cracked door to get away from Mac, slamming it closed beneath his shoulders. He flicks up watery emerald eyes in apology, meeting Mac's expression of shock, and his face crumples like paper.

   "What happened, Charlie?" Mac whispers, holding his hands in front of him in a placating gesture that he hopes will soothe the creature. Charlie only shakes his head, snot running down to the cupid's bow beneath his freckled nose.

   "I don't like it," the cryptic creature murmurs between hiccupping sobs. "I don't like it."

   Even Dennis' rapt attention to the television has been drawn away, and Mac swears he sees a crease between his brows, the tiniest hint of concern as Charlie slides to the ground and cries, snots, and slobbers into his hands.

   Mac kneels in front of him and actively works against his Jesus-like, nurturing instinct to hold a man in need. "You don't... you don't like what?" he asks, tentatively, casting a wary glance over his shoulder at Dennis, who only stares entranced at Charlie and all his opening wounds.

   "He just keeps... he puts his- his hands, you know, at night, like- like a bat, you know, we wrap up like bats, and I get sick, and I don't- I... I let him, every time and I..." he gasps between words, wiping his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. He blubbers something else about bat poison, chokes up, and then disintegrates into whimpers.

   Dennis' eyes narrow. Mac feels sick.

   "Who, Charlie? Who is he?"

   The silence carries on, cicadas scream in the night and crickets play string symphonies beneath their agony. "Uncle Jack," Charlie whispers, and the guillotine slices through the air.

   Uncle Jack, the lawyer from New York, always home to visit his sweet sister Bonnie and his sweeter nephew Charlie, always with the leather gloves on and a mustache full of sweat. Uncle Jack, the man of the law, the man of justice, the savior of young men's lives. Uncle Jack, the one taking Charlie to see Sandlot at the cinema on a Friday night.

   Mac swallows with a thick throat, offering a hand at which Charlie flinches, but takes. "Come on, buddy," he says quietly, and leads Charlie into the bathroom off of Mac's room, where his friend curls up in the tub. Charlie likes to sleep there when he spends the night, says it's like a bird's nest. Mac uses the shower downstairs, and keeps blankets in the upstairs tub for Charlie. A body-less hand extends into the bathroom doorway, joint intact, and Mac passes it to Charlie. "You're okay, Charlie," he soothes, as the unfamiliar creature presses his forehead against the cold faucet and breathes plumes of smoke up into the showerhead. "You're okay."

   Mac closes the bathroom door behind him with a gentle click, and sits next to Dennis on the bed, where his red-eyed friend is hunched over and glaring out of a closed window. The television light dances over his hardened face in a ballet of crimson, and Mac doesn't dare to breathe.

   "I'm going to kill him, Mac," Dennis promises with a voice like glinting steel. Mac looks at a little wooden statue of Jesus in prayer on his bedside table, biting on his bottom lip until he tastes blood and his fists shake by his sides. He looks away from the statue, looks at Dennis instead.

   "Not without me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿ 
> 
> questions? comments? concerns?
> 
> (and check the end notes for SURPRISES):
> 
>  
> 
> [WANTED: RONALD MCDONALD](https://flic.kr/p/2c5s8xT)


	2. chapter two

     Dennis has a twin sister named Sweet Dee, who likes to sit in her window and stare out across the street all day long. Mac thinks it's because she's ashamed of herself, what with the massive metal back brace encasing her chest and circling her head like an aluminum halo (which he claims to think is rather cool, in a cyborg kind of way), but Dennis knows it's because she has no friends. Dee goes to Notre Dame High School because St. Joseph's is only for boys and their parents like Dennis better, enough to send _him_ to private school. Notre Dame is where all the guys from St. Joseph get their girlfriends, except Dee isn't one of them. She tells everyone she jacked off Adriano Calvanese at a party, but she still isn't his girlfriend, and nobody believes her anyway.

     "What are you dickheads doing?" she asks, feigning disinterest, hands tucked in her jeans and trying not to make too many creaking noises. Mac and Dennis can't be bothered to answer her as Dennis draws a line in thick marker on a map from one jagged state to another, and Mac chews the end of his own marker in thought. Charlie, tired but in far better shape than last night at Mac's, turns to her and smiles.

    "We're planning a vacation because I'm emotionally unstable and liable to kill myself," he answers in the way that only toddlers and parrots repeat others, wiggling his eyebrows.

    Dee creaks as she raises an arm to tuck some wispy blonde hair behind her ear and move a little further into Dennis' bedroom, and frowns as she peers over at the map. "New York?" she reads, bewildered. "All they've got there that we don't is a little bit more rat shit and maybe one other strand of tetanus."

    Dennis sighs, dropping his marker to massage his temples. "Your voice, Sweet Dee, is grating."

    Mac nods. "Yeah Dee, shut up."

    "Don't help me," Dennis snaps, and then turns to Charlie, face melting into something kinder almost instantaneously. "Charlie, would you be a doll and go down to the kitchen to grab us some snacks?" Charlie perks up and salutes.

    "Ten-four," he says as heads quickly for the door, and "roger that," he adds just a little too late, tumbling down the grand staircase, dirty sneakers squeaking against the marble. Dennis stands, turns toward Dee and flaps the map in her face.

    "If you _must_ know," he drawls, "we're going to New York to kill Charlie's uncle."

    Mac's bitten the wrong end of the marker and is at present rubbing red ink from the corner of his mouth, eyes crossed to try and look down at it. Dee crosses her arms with a long squeak of metal and quirks a brow.

    "Can I come?"

    Dennis sneers. "Why? So the guy can hear us coming from a mile away, Robocop?"

    Mac glances up from the mess of ink on his fingers and cranes his neck to see around Dennis. "We could use her as a shield," he suggests, and Dennis tilts his head in consideration.

   "Screw you guys," Dee snarls, and sweeps her arm across Dennis' dresser to knock all of his trinkets on the floor before she leaves. Dennis kicks the fallen cassettes and tubes of makeup away from the doorway (the maid has to earn her pay somehow, right?) and returns to the bed to sketch out stops between Philadelphia and New York City with Mac.

   He half-listens as Mac explains that as proud Americans they have to go see the Statue of Liberty, either before or after the uncle drowns on a throatful of his own blood, and finds his gaze melting down to Mac's always-moving mouth.

   "Oh, I know," Mac laughs, bringing his fingers to his lips, "I didn't mean to chew on your marker; can't help it."

   Dazed and distracted, "Charlie should be back with snacks any second now, pal, hang in there," he jokes, and Mac snorts, drawing a red X through Florida because he hates Florida, while Dennis averts his confused stare to his hands.

   (He hadn't noticed the ink.)

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   "You did _what?"_

   "I slashed your tires."

   Charlie tries to chew a cheeseball as quietly as he can.

   "Any of you other bozos have a car?" asks Sweet Dee, sweeping her arms out in question. The boys blink at each other, and she smiles, something wide and devilish and utterly satisfied. "Then I guess I'll be driving."

   "We could just knock you out and steal yours," Mac states matter-of-factly and maybe counterproductively to the verb 'steal'. Dee gives a little shrug, and hands over a couple of pieces of plastic.

   Dennis stares at the two halves of his driver's license in Mac's palm, just as Charlie shouts "Shotgun!" 

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   After Sweet Dee's fifth squawking rendition of "I'm Every Woman", Dennis leans over the divider and punches the radio off.

   "Hey!" Dee shouts, swerving slightly into the other lane.

   "I think we've been patient enough, Shitney Houston," says Dennis, leaning back and buckling up again as the gun shop and its bulky red-lettered sign makes itself known on the horizon. Charlie shrugs.

   "I liked it, Dee," he compliments, curious gaze flickering from crumbling apartments to stray dogs moving in blurs out of the window. "You can't sing for shit," he explains, garnering a look of offense from the vocalist herself, "but I liked your... passion!"

   Dennis notices Dee's expression soften in the rearview mirror, a blush pinkening her cheeks, and groans. "Get a room," he mutters, but goes wholly unheard as the two upfront start to chatter on about singing lessons and renting a studio and all number of ridiculous things. He looks to Mac who sits a seat apart from Dennis in the back, legs spread wide and wiry arms crossed over his chest as he stares out of the window.

   "You should really buckle up when Sweet Dee's driving, you know," he advises, "she can only turn her head about ten degrees in either direction and I think she's about to change lanes."

   Mac looks surprised for a moment, as if he'd been deep in thought, and then relaxes. "We're almost there," he says, and then smacks his head against the window.

   "Yikes! Sorry," Dee says, yanking the car back into her original lane. "The bastard just snuck up on me."

   Dennis tilts his head as if to say "I told you so," but Mac holds up a hand to preemptively decline the lecture and rubs at his temple. "Is she really coming with us all the way?" he complains as Dee pulls the car into a parking spot, shuts the rumbling engine off and climbs out, along with Charlie after he figures out how to flick back the child safety lock. "I kind of thought it would just be me and you, but then Charlie had to worm his way in to see about the fucking exotic pigeons of New York and now your annoying sister wants to tag along for _whatever_ reason..."

   Dennis frowns as Mac devolves into grumbles and runs his hands through his hair, visibly frustrated, perhaps too much for what the situation would call for. "I wanted it to be us too, buddy," he agrees despite Mac's slight overreaction, and places a cold hand on his friend's arm. Mac flicks those big brown eyes up in surprise, glancing momentarily at Dennis' touch, too quickly to sear it into memory and too slowly for Dennis not to notice. He draws his hand back awkwardly and offers a tilted smile instead, something safer, less intimate. "At least this way if something goes wrong we can just pin the whole thing on Sweet Dee."

   "Or Charlie, " Mac jokes, a bit pink in the face. "He could probably just plead insanity."

   Dennis opens the car door and steps out, walks around to open Mac's for him. He's not sure why; maybe he likes the blush on Mac's cheeks. Maybe he likes the awe in his eyes. Mac rewards him with a pair of red-to-the-rim ears and a shy little bow of his head as he climbs out of the car. "Yeah, but we like Charlie," Dennis explains, and Mac laughs as they head inside. He holds the door for Dennis this time, the store bell jingling overhead.

   "Hey, I'm gonna need to see some ID," the store clerk asks near immediately, as the four of them congregate in front of a glass display case full of big guns, half-guns, small guns, all sorts of guns that not one of them could put a name to.

   "They have booze here?" Charlie asks, perking up and shuffling over to the counter. Dee creaks loudly as she reaches up to place her hand on the glass in front of one of those AR, AK, ABC, LMNOP-types of guns, with the big magazines and the skinny barrels, the kind deranged people use to spray down their algebra class. Much too obvious, too loud, no class. Dennis has his sights set on a sleek little pistol in the display case under the register, and goes to lean on the wood-trimmed counter with his best disarming smile.

   "Do we _look_ like criminals?" he asks the clerk, who looms over him, stubbly beard and military buzzcut framing a hard face. He has a couple years and a couple pounds on Dennis, but there isn't a person on Earth he can't charm into giving him what he wants. "Why don't you just ring up that pretty little piece on the third shelf down there for us and we'll be on our way, handsome." 

   The clerk practically growls, irritated. "It ain't your record I'm worried about," he says, "you and your lil' posse look like you just got out of diapers, and it ain't a good look having you playing around in here. So I'm gonna ask you kids one more time; do you got ID or not?"

   Dennis shifts his jaw, fingering the butchered license in his front pocket. Charlie is loudly mispronouncing racist slogans from the keychains on hooks by the front door, Mac correcting him just as loudly, and Dee is producing a series of ear-piercing creaks as she struggles with the handle of a locked gun cabinet. What a shitshow. He'll never convince this fat patronizing fuck he's traveling with adults no matter what flawless lie he can concoct in the next thirty seconds. For all this guy's got of a first impression, they may as well be toddlers stacked up under trench coats.

   "Well-" Dennis raises his brows to carefully read the clerk's nametag. _"Benny,"_ he says, drawing the name out long and cold. "Most folks don't respond too kindly to being disrespected. If my companions here wanted to be treated like children they would've gone to the goddamn arcade. I suppose my business partners and I will have to stock our new shooting range through one of your competitors. Good day, sir." 

   Stupid, fat, ugly Benny only raises an eyebrow as Dennis moves to corral his circus monkeys toward the exit, stunned speechless. Dennis' speaking prowess always did have that effect on people. If he were a nerd, he could've been debate team captain and drama club president and even the fucking principal, if he wanted.

   Charlie stops in his tracks as everyone piles into the car, and turns to look up at the red letter sign: _Freddy's Firearms_ , where the R's in each word are shaped like pistols.

   "Wait, why are we buying guns?" 

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   The little green clock in the dash reads about 5:00 PM when they slam into the side of a Chevrolet and pin it against the metal railing on the side of the road.

   Mac had been pulling Sweet Dee's hair through the slot between the front seat and its headrest, red in the face as she took the Lord's name in vain, and then again and again and again just to spite him. It was like being inside a clap of thunder, as Dennis' head rocked back hard against the headrest and the passenger airbag exploded against his lungs and the front windshield shattered splitting into millions of little crystals in every direction and Sweet Dee screamed and a thought crossed his mind: he couldn't hear her godawful brace creaking.

   When everything stops moving and breaking and shrieking, they breathe for a minute in that way people do when they're not sure if they've died. Dennis sees the shape of a man hanging his head in the driver's seat of the Chevrolet, surely dead, and isn't sure he's not the only one left until someone wails, a squeaky, high-pitched scream punctuated by frantic bangs.

   "Charlie," Mac gasps, and Dennis' stomach turns as he twists around to check on Mac in the backseat and watches a rivulet of blood cascade down his friend's temple. _"Charlie,"_ Mac repeats. Dennis collects himself and the two of them scramble out of the car on trembling limbs to pop the trunk, from which Charlie crawls out on all fours, panting hard and crying openly. 

   Charlie Kelly has never left Philadelphia in all his life. He's been perfectly content to stay in his mother's home, receiving baths well into adulthood and eating homecooked meals often with a side of jellybeans, just the way Bonnie Kelly knows he likes it. His thirst for exploration extends to the tunnels and sewers and alleys of his hometown and no further, and the suggestion of leaving brings him great anxiety. Mac's solution was to throw him in the trunk with Dennis' coat and call it a bird's nest, and Charlie was okay with that.

   Less so, now that he's been rattled around in it like a bingo ball.

   Dennis leaves Mac with the task of chasing Charlie down, who's crawling hysterically toward the empty intersection, and walks back around to the obliterated front of the car to find the driver's side door wide open.

   "Dee?"

   _Creak._

_Creak, creak, creak creak creakcreakcreak._

   Dennis runs in the opposite direction of the two cars because Sweet Dee is running and Sweet Dee never runs, only drags herself around like a broken toy, and for a moment he feels truly afraid.

   There's a small pop, and then another, and when they reach the road uphill Mac and Charlie's awe-filled faces are alight with the color of farmland sunsets and blazing explosions.

   He turns, and both vehicles are twin blazing bonfires.

   They watched an action film once. One where the bad guy robbed and killed and destroyed and had an excellent mind, the kind of mind that made young Dennis hungry and jealous. The criminal chunked his dead businessmen bodies into the back of a company van, lit a piece of rope aflame and dipped the fuse into the van's open gas tank. And **_boom_** goes the evidence.

   Sweet Dee tosses a star-struck Mac his lighter, and Dennis' eyes float down to her midriff where her pink sweater is unravelling, strings hanging broken and whispering around her waist.

   "I guess we're walking," she says, hands shaking at her sides.

   And Dennis has never loved her more.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> merder....
> 
> big thank u for all the sweet comments on my first chapter, i was and still am very insecure about this fic so it means the whole world to me. sunny fans are so nice? i love u? anyway thank u so much for reading and leaving kudos and comments and all of those lovely things u do 
> 
> btw i am @slugcities on twitter if u want to be mootie wooties okay thank u the end
> 
> [WANTED: DENNIS REYNOLDS](https://flic.kr/p/2c5s8c2)


	3. chapter three

    For a Catholic, Mac lies a lot.

    Mac lies when Charlie asks if he can come over and Mac says he's not going to be home (Charlie watches from the bushes across the street as two silhouettes dance in the window of Mac's bedroom). Mac lies when he says he goes to church every Sunday, and fights in karate tournaments every Thursday. Mac lies when he says he likes girls. Mac lies when he says his parents love him. Mac lies when he acts like he's happy. Mac lies all the time.

    "Are we still in Philadelphia?"

    "Yes, Charlie," Mac lies.

    Charlie stuffs down his nerves and curls his hands into fists inside his dark, secret pockets, where no one can see that his hands are scared. Mac and Dennis aren't scared, and Dee might be a little scared, but that's because she just blew up two whole cars and an evil businessman and now the police are on her trail. Dee's awesome.

    Charlie watches dandelions wiggle in the breeze as the four of them trudge along the side of the road. He really likes dandelions, and all their tiny umbrellas. The secret to getting your wishes is to always wish that the umbrellas will fly off into the sky like birds. All of Charlie's dandelion wishes come true. Pretty genius. 

    "You okay?"

    Mac steadies Dennis with a hand on the small of his back, as Dennis teeters slightly to the left and touches his forehead. He nods to say "I'm okay," and touches Mac's hand on his shoulder softly.

    Dennis falls over sometimes because he doesn't have enough food in his stomach to keep him on the ground. Dennis doesn't like to eat, but eating is important because it keeps you from floating off into the air like an empty balloon. Mac always catches his string though, and sometimes feeds him little things, like baby carrots and crackers and tiny Snickers bars.

    "We need to take a break," Mac insists as Dee plunders forward, brace shuddering with every heavy pounding step she takes, like she wants to get as far away as she can from the two piles of ash sitting like mountains a couple of miles back. She whips her head around real sharp when Mac says that, with her mouth agape like she's going to bite his whole head off. When she spots Dennis' sick balloon face, her eyes turn sad and she sighs.

    "Alright," she mutters. "Pop a squat, dipshits. We'll rest for a little while." Dee looks toward the setting sun (wide and cold and orange like a great big fruit) and then checks the little watch on her wrist. "It's gonna be dark soon, and I don't want to be stuck out here in the cold. I can see buildings, so we're getting close enough to wave down a cab."

    Mac rolls his eyes and flaps his four fingers against his thumb like he's controlling a sock puppet. "Who put Big Bird in charge?" he complains, and then looks at Dennis to see if he'll laugh, but Dennis only sits back on his hands with his eyes closed, pale in the face. Charlie gives him a good "Ha ha!" and feels pleased when Mac grins.

   "Someone had to, since the three of you were pissing your big boy pants back there," Dee snarls, and Charlie touches his crotch to make sure she's kidding. Mac jumps to his feet, and the whoosh of air next to Dennis' head makes him flop back into the grass and cover his eyes with his arms.

   "I WASN'T PISSING ANYTHING!" Mac roars. "I WAS KEEPING CHARLIE SAFE, LIKE I ALWAYS DO!"

   Dee quirks a brow impassively and then goes to inspect her fingers, moving to peel a bit of skin from the frame around her thumbnail. Mac huffs, breathing hard, and drops to the ground again. "Yeah," he murmurs, "enjoy your little moment of victory, Dee. You just costed us our ride and also committed _THE MOST ATROCIOUS SIN IN THE TEN COMMANDMENTS!"_

    Mac talks about the Bible a lot, and God even more. Charlie hates God. No particular reason, he just seems like he has a stick up his ass, and church people are cuckoo crazy.

    Dee laughs and flips off the sky with both hands. Her back brace squeals through the whole movement. Charlie notices her fingers are very long, perfect for digging up worms. He should ask her to come over and dig up worms sometime. Mac, however, looks furious, and averts his angry stare to his feet.

    "Both of you just shut up. Charlie's the only one being tolerable on this trip, and that's saying something about the sheer level of unbearableness you both are exhibiting," Dennis says, quiet but firm in that cold way of his.

    Charlie likes Dennis. Dennis is a bastard; he's mean and cruel and picks meat off of people's bodies like a vulture and thinks he's much handsomer than he really is, even with no feathers on his fleshy head, but he's always been nice to Charlie. Once Dennis even hugged him, when Charlie was having a bad day because Adriano Calvanese kept making him eat spiders, even the ones he'd named. Dennis had looked sad when Adriano made Charlie eat all those spiders.

    Most people were afraid to touch Charlie because he was dirty and smelled like drugs, but Dennis followed him into the bathroom and pulled him away from the janitor's bleach bucket and held Charlie's head against his chest for a real long time.

    So Charlie likes Dennis, even if he doesn't have any feathers on his head.

    "Yeah, well, I think I'm feeling pretty well-rested now," Dee says, and clambers to a squeaky creaky stand. She starts to walk away, and Mac helps Dennis up while they both scowl like frogs. Charlie follows Dee toward the skyscrapers, heart beating fast in his chest because those are _New York_ skyscrapers, and watches Dee's long blonde hair swing back and forth in its ponytail as she leads them to the promised land.

    Maybe he should blow up some cars too.

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    They wave down a cab and the driver asks "Where 'ya headed?" and Dee says, "New York City!" like a stupid tourist. Charlie wishes she would have said somewhere cooler and more obscure, like Australia, and then they could have just walked from there.

   The others think it's beautiful when the city starts falling into place around them in handfuls of headlights and glowing billboards, especially now that it's nighttime and everything is a million times as bright. Charlie doesn't say anything, because it's a little jarring, really, and too attention-seeking. All the people and cars and flashing make his heart go _boomboomboomboom_ and he's already over it. He looks for pigeons as the cab rolls to little intermittent stops between red lights, while Mac leans over his shoulder and breathes down his neck to _ooh_ and _ahh_ at all the dirty neon-lit streets. 

_____ _

    They stop the cab driver in front of a McDonald's because they're starving to death and about to float off, and Dee pays him with Dennis' wallet. In the McDonald's Mac orders because he knows what everyone likes: Dennis salad, Charlie HAPPY MEAL, Mac hamburger. He forgets to order for Dee, so she buys herself her own hamburger and sits at another table to eat alone and stare out of the window. Mac takes three big bites of his hamburger and then frowns. He walks to Dee's table and speaks to her quietly. She smiles, it's a very good smile, and then she comes to sit with all of them.

_____ _

_____ _

    Charlie's Happy Meal toy is Charlene Sinclair from _Dinosaurs_ the television show, set in 60,000,003 BC, Pangaea. Charlene is a Pro-to-ceratops, and she gets on Charlie's fucking nerves. "La la," Charlie murmurs, which is Charlene's funny catchphrase, but it's really not all that funny. Mac reaches over as he's getting up to take a piss and pinches the little dinosaur by her head.

_____ _

____

    "Charlene, _Charlene,"_ he sings, wiggling the dinosaur next to Charlie's head. Mac likes to call Charlie "Charlene" to fry his nerves like eggs.

____

____

     "What a garbage show," Dennis mutters, taking one of Mac's fries while he's in the restroom, only Mac always sets his fries between himself and Dennis and shakes them out of the container so Dennis can steal them easier.

____

____

    Dee shrugs. "I think it's kind of funny," she says, and Charlie flicks the dinosaur over to her. She looks surprised when Charlene spins over on her tail and brushes against Dee's hand.

____

____

    "I don't want it," he explains, and Dee smiles.

____

____

    She reminds him of an eagle: smart, powerful, and tons of feathers.

____

____

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____

____

    Mac comes back to the table with blood on his face.

____

____

    "We need to leave," Dennis snaps. _"Now!"_

____

____

    Charlie and Dee scramble out of their seats and flee the McDonald's as fast as they can. He forgets Charlene on the table.

____

____

 

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [WANTED: DEE REYNOLDS](https://flic.kr/p/2doDgvq)


	4. chapter four

    When Dee was ten years old her father flew home from whatever island his business was ravaging at the time and reconvened with his family. For a vacation, and certainly not to receive a shipment of cocaine or oversee the execution of a business competitor, he rented out two rooms in the most expensive hotel on the coast of New Jersey, and then a third after he and Dee's mother screamed at each other for hours and shattered a fancy vase.

   Dennis and Dee liked to play this game where they pretended to be mother and father and screamed up each other's noses, Dennis falling in love with the words fat and ugly and cow, Dee marrying herself to the words divorce and money and hate. While they mocked their parents from behind a wall, Dennis lifted up the floral vase in their room and brought it down upon the pink carpet like the hammer of Thor. When they finished grinning at each other, Dennis fished out a tube of Krazy Glue from his suitcase, the one with Catwoman embossed on the front compartment, and patched the vase back together like nothing had happened. It looked like shit and they paid for it anyway, but how mad could their father really be, for they tried. Dennis was always so good at that; fixing things, cleaning them up, trying to make everything in the world look untouched.

   Mac trembles uncontrollably over a flickering candle, praying to God, and Dee wonders if Dennis can fix this one.

   "He was staring at my dick, God," Mac accuses, the flame of a tall Virgin Mary dancing the tango with his troubled breaths.

   "Stop talking to God!" Charlie wails, pacing the room and wringing his freckled hands. "We're the ones who go to jail and get our assholes pounded if we don't figure out a plan, not God! Not _God's_ asshole!"

   Dennis tosses a shimmering pocket knife on the coffee table next to the candle and then crooks a finger to order Mac's shirt off. Mac tugs his bloodied sleeveless tee off like it hurts him to move and offers it up, head bowed. Dennis, without a word, disappears into the bathroom again, a quickness to his step. A purpose that isn't always there; rarely, in fact.

   Dee thinks he's enjoying this, thinks he's been waiting his whole life for this.

   The way Mac tells it, he was too disturbed to say anything while the man stared at his little shrimpy dick from the urinal over, but followed the stranger out of the restroom and out of the restaurant, stopped him behind the building. Accusatory and bordering on extremely homophobic, Mac addressed the issue at hand, to which the stranger responded with Newton's third law of motion: an equal and opposite reaction. Mac had not been staring at the guy's dick, like the stranger said he was, swears he wasn't, never even looked, hammers home the fact that he certainly wasn't-- and that he had clocked the man moving a hand toward his waistband to retrieve a weapon.

   So Mac defended himself, and defended himself, and defended himself, eight more times.

   (Mac stabbed a man to death behind a McDonald's for finding out a secret that everybody knows.)

   So he prays. For which atrocious sin to be forgiven, Dee isn't sure.

   Dennis comes back for the pants, leaves Mac nearly-naked in front of the Virgin herself and fishes two wallets and a lighter out of the pockets. They hit the table in three thuds and Charlie rifles through the neat brown leather one that Mac took off the guy he perforated, tossing out plastic cards with some middle-aged white guy's face on them. Dee shuffles over to inspect them, craning her neck down as best she can.

   "Not an organ donor," she mumbles, "asshole."

   "Maybe he was Jewish," Charlie says, "looks Jewish," and Mac frowns harder.

   "You can't just say things like that," he scolds. Charlie throws a smoothie joint punch card at Mac's face.

   "And you can't just kill people either, yet here we are," Charlie retorts, throwing dollar bills from the wallet over his shoulder which Dee tries to discreetly collect by drawing them towards her underneath her tennis shoe. Mac holds up the punch card. One more holepunch and the dead guy could've gotten a free smoothie. He bursts into tears again.

   Dee helps Charlie cut the man's credit cards into halves because his hands are shaking too badly, and tries to ignore the sound of scrubbing from the bathroom and the frantic, annoying prayers spilling from Mac's lips like an unending string of drool.

   It's better than sitting in the windowsill, at least.

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   "Are you mad at me?" Mac whispers in the dark.

   Dee cracks an eye open to eavesdrop seeing as she can't sleep; keeps thinking about the police busting down the door and dragging her out in handcuffs. Charlie's the only one who was willing to share a bed with the aluminum monster and is at present snoring softly in the place between the pillows and the headboard, a sound that recalls the quiet hum of a space heater.

   Charlie's sweet, spent most of the first two hours in bed thrashing around and kneeing her in the head and sighing, but Dee's just content to have someone on this trip who doesn't hate her, unlike Mac and her brother.

   "No," Dennis answers. "I'm proud of you. You were messy, but you were smart. You did good, Mac."

   There's a small rustling of the sheets and Dennis is holding Mac against his chest like a child, hands soft on the other boy's body and raw from scrubbing the blood out of his clothes. Raw from fixing things, cleaning them up, and he touches Mac like he's the world.

   Dennis killed a bluebird when they were twelve, and Dee thinks about it all the time these days. Thinks about it when she hears his footsteps pacing his bedroom and his voice chattering low and rough and angry to no one. Thinks about it when he loses Monopoly once and holds the fire poker against her neck. Thinks about it when she lights a corpse and two cars on fire and he looks at her like she saved him from it.

   "What are we gonna do, Den?" Mac whispers.

   Dennis sighs. "Look, buddy, there were no cameras, we have the murder weapon-"

   "It was _self-defense!"_

   "No prints, no wallet. They'll write it off as a mugging." The silence stretches on for a second, until Mac finally nods his head. "You just go on and sleep now, alright, baby boy?"

   After a while, a still-awake Mac says "I wanna go home." There's a quiet that follows and in it Dee wonders if she could stay in New York forever. Start over at a new school and make lots of girlfriends like she's on Sex and the City and get a job in one of those shiny-tiled posh stores that sell mink coats to moronic one-percenters, or getting coffee for a sexy businessman, and they'll have secret affairs in a big office where they swipe all the important files and staplers off of a long sleek desk and then snog on top of it for hours. Or a businesswoman, snogging a businesswoman would be fine too. Just as long as they're rich.

   "Just one more thing to take care of," Dennis says, "and then we can go wherever you like." His voice is soft and calm even as he glosses his lips with prayers of murder and Dee thinks about the videotape she once saw with "Bluebird" and a set of three stars drawn on its white sticker label in Dennis' dresser drawer, wonders what all the other blank tapes were for.

   Dee falls asleep in a bed in New York that smells like New Jersey with Charlie rotating around on the pillows like a fetus in a womb, and crying a little bit in his sleep.

   She hopes that Dennis gets to make a new tape tomorrow.

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   In the morning while he's in the bathroom, Charlie's picture flashes across the hotel television along with his age, his height, and his eye color.

   So the others shove Charlie around as they're checking out of the hotel, elbow him into vending machines and edge him off of the sidewalk as they trudge toward the smoothie place a few blocks down and fill out the last circle of a nearly-full punch card. Mac and Dennis share their smoothie with two straws and knock their foreheads together and laugh, and Dee doesn't let Charlie have any of the one they're supposed to share until she remembers Charlene the Protoceratops and shoves the banana smoothie at him hard enough to splash some out onto his olive coat.

   She glares at him as Charlie smiles gratefully, happy green eyes and sweet freckled cheeks, and takes a big gulp. Dee imagines Bonnie Kelly's stupid dumpling face crying and crying and crying, praying over a candle for her precious son to come home.

   No one else got a missing person's report. It's not fair.

   Charlie finishes the smoothie, rubs his hands together like a fruit fly for a little while, and then blurts out:

   "Are you guys gonna kill me?"

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   "You were buying guns and drove me out of Philly in Dee's trunk and keep on killing people and we haven't even talked about going to see that big green Olympic-torch lady with all the pigeons on her which was the whole selling point of this frogulent 'vacation'."

   "Fraudulent," Mac corrects, holding up a finger. Charlie waves his arms around dismissively.

   "And now today you're all being mean and quiet-"

   _"Charlie,"_ Dennis interrupts. "We're just here to enjoy the unique sights and smog of New York, okay? You need to quit being so paranoid. And we did this for you, for _you_ to have a vacation, so it wouldn't kill you to be a little more grateful."

   Charlie plays with his fingers, face twisted up, and then nods. "Yeah, okay," he concedes. "Sorry."

   Once in New York the three in on the plan had realized an entire state was rather large and they didn't have a clue where the uncle lived, so they looked him up in a statewide Yellow Pages book and called to ask exactly where his firm was. The dumb secretary didn't know a thing about why they really called (murder) asking them to set up an appointment and all kinds of other stupid shit. She was competent enough to give them the address, though. Manhattan, she said, 350 82nd Street in Manhattan.

   They didn't have any more money what with the taxi and the McDonald's and the hotel and the smoothie and the fact that Dennis and Dee had cut up one another's credit cards last week, so they walked with their thumbs out until the skyscrapers turned into department stores turned into apartments turned into intermittent manufactured homes and a pick-up truck rumbled to a stop and lived up to its namesake.

   The driver's an old man with a big gray beard and a hard face like a stone, Dee imagines it's been worn down by years of hard labor on a family farm back in Colorado. She imagines the man is travelling to visit his soft-handed son, a soy boy beta cuck suit-and-tie stockbroker living in a Manhattan penthouse.

   "Not much farther, right? That banana smoothie was killer," Dee asks from the backseat, holding her bubbling stomach full of too much fiber. The metal rings of her brace are forcing Mac and Dennis to shove their faces up against the truck windows and act really interested in the old decrepit houses falling away behind them as the quiet, gunshot-here-and-there neighborhood feeds into the next concrete jungle. The boys had chosen to sit apart from each other after Dee told them to stop flirting in the smoothie place, like she doesn't know they want to shove their tongues down each other's throats.

   The old driver grunts an affirmative, and then Charlie reaches out and slams the man's head against the steering wheel.

   The car swerves off of the road, running down a mailbox with flowers painted on it and then three more mailboxes until it slows down and the truck's hood crumples slowly against the drain tunnel of a deep ditch. Dee releases her iron grip on Dennis' hand and opens her eyes to see rivulets of red dripping from the wheel, and sweet, sweet Charlie pointing right at her, eyes wild.

   "You poisoned the smoothie!" he screams. "You're all trying to kill me!"

   Dee is starting to maybe miss the windowsill.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this one took a while, finals week.. you know... 
> 
> anyway i hope u liked it!!!! thank u for reading and leaving kudos <3 all ur support ur comments really mean so much to me i love u and i hope ur enjoying this story
> 
>  
> 
> [MISSING: CHARLIE KELLY](https://flic.kr/p/2dt8gGg)


	5. chapter five

   Just the two of them, somersaulting through space and eating stars. There's Mars, oh, and Venus. Charlie keeps a little space worm, this squirming yellow thing with great big antennae, on a leash. He feeds it pieces of meteors. Mac leaves big footprints in the moonsand. As Mac gets older and thinks about it over the toilet at night, after his father makes him cry so hard he vomits, Dennis is there in Mission Control, making funny little comments about hot alien babes over the coms and reminding Mac and Charlie to come back down to Earth sometime. Mac and Charlie were gonna be astronauts; or co-presidents, or the founders of some super famous charity for young, hard-on-cash Philly boys. They were gonna do really great things, gonna make the universe a better place.

    Instead, they killed people.

    Mac wonders if it even matters; if the universe and the Heavens really even give a shit if any of the ants die. The fear of being struck down by lightning crackling out the name of God's wrath passed with the destruction of a third human soul to which came no answer.

    God doesn't care. God never stepped between Mac's waiting body and mugger's knives. God never held him when Mac was lying in bed, thinking maybe Heaven would be less lonely. God was only a stand-in father to Mac, and God sent his last son to get nails hammered through his hands and die on a flagpole.

    So fuck it- Mac thinks when Dee preemptively asks him not to stop and pray for the old driver with a bloody halo- what's one more dead child of God.

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    By the time the three of them extract themselves from the smoking truck and catch up to Charlie, across the road and crawling on all fours toward some old train tracks, he's sucked his snot up, stopped crying, and is brandishing a rusty old pipe from some tetanus-suburban front yard.

   "Don't come any closer!" he shouts, hunched in a fighting-stance and waving the pipe in wild figure-eights before him. "I'll whack you, your eyes'll fly out!"

   "Charlie, no one's trying to kill you, you dipshit!" Dee screams, face flashing between angry and desperate as cars begin to slow down next to the wrecked truck across the highway, alarmed and curious. "Put the fucking pipe down!"

    Dee readies a sigh of relief as Charlie's grip falters and the end of the pipe brushes the browning grass, but another one of the million switches in that kid's head flips on and a crazed look passed behind his eyes. "You all hate me because my mom misses me, and yours don't," he snarls. "You want to kill me because I'm happy and my family loves me! You're jealous!" Then, he charges right at Dee.

   "Shit!" she screams, tripping over herself as Charlie lunges with his rusty pipe and is practically foaming at the mouth. He swings it once, hard and fast, and when the weapon barely skims Dee's brace, Dennis tackles him on the recharge. The taller boy pins Charlie's wrists against the ground and straddles his waist, red in the face as Charlie thrashes and bares his teeth, tears rolling fast again from the corners of those sweet green eyes.

    "You've lost your goddamned mind, Charlie," Dennis scolds, voice sharp and hard and stuffed with rage, but if Mac listens close, there's a tremble in it, shaking in the undertones. "Nobody's jealous of your nightmarish childhood and your family doesn't give a shit about you, kid," he growls, and Charlie's body slumps.

    "Yes they do," he argues, a gray cloud moving in and distorting his expression. "My mom-"

    "Your mom gave you baths well into puberty but she doesn't care how you turn out," Dennis says.

    Mac raises a hand. "Yeah, your mom's a prostitute, dude."

    "His mom's a prostitute?" Dee asks. Charlie screams, kicking and bucking up against Dennis' weight again.

    "No!" he shouts, sobbing. "No, she's not!"

    "Your dad dumped you when it was still appropriate for you to shit your pants and cry," Dennis adds, shoving Charlie's shoulder into the ground as he struggles, "and your uncle's a diddler!"

   Mac stops peeling blades of grass apart long enough to inspect Charlie's reaction, who's gone limp under Dennis and is crying openly, hopeless and exhausted by his own lies. Mac can't imagine still being in denial like that. Poor Charlie.

    "We didn't come out here to kill you," Dennis says, moving a hand beneath his bomber jacket and materializing a dark handgun from it. He cocks it back, and the three of them still. "We're killing your uncle, Charlie, and we're doing it with or without you."

    With, Mac thinks. The whole point of this was to protect Charlie, and now Dennis wants to just leave him behind on some tracks in the middle of Nowhere, New York? Maybe Mac should speak up, but he can't find it in himself to open his mouth.

    "Where did you get that?" Dee whispers, awestruck.

    Dennis spins the pistol clumsily around his finger, tensing everyone up like springs for when the fucking thing fires off, and then points the butt of it at the old dead driver.

    "Morgue Santa was packing," he explains, and then aims the gun at Charlie as he climbs off of him. Charlie scrambles onto his knees and holds up his hands.

    "Leave him alone, Dennis," Mac grounds out at last, and the former doesn't even spare him a glance, arm in a straight line as he keeps the barrel pointed between Charlie's wet eyes.

    "If he doesn't pull any stunts I won't blow his brains out, but if he does..."

    Dee moves in a little closer to Mac, opal eyes wide as a small white car stops behind the truck on the side of the road. A middle-aged woman steps out with her phone to her ear, 911, presumably, on the line, and then abruptly pauses next to the truck window. "Fuck," Dee mutters, and the woman's head snaps toward them.

    "Hey, you kids!" she calls. "You know anything about this? I think he's dead!" her voice wobbles and the four of them shake their heads quickly. "Wait," she says, leaning forward and squinting. "Do you have a gun? Young man, how old are you? You kids shouldn't be playing around with that gun!" They never get a chance to answer any of the questions before she's hurried across the road, diva sunglasses pinning back her short highlighted hair and heeled boots clicking against the pavement.

    "What's going on?" she repeats. "I'm on the phone with the police and if you four know anything you need to tell them."

    Dennis makes no effort to put away the gun, nor does Charlie attempt to hide the blood splattered on his coat. The woman switches her motherly stare from Dennis' confident glare to Mac and Dee's high-held chins and defensive, city-kid postures, and then Charlie, wiping dried tears from his cheeks, knees muddied and clothes bloodied. "You're that kid from the news," she says at last, a twinge of fear in her voice as she backs away, bringing the phone back to her ear. Dennis takes a step forward to follow her.

    "I have a child here," she says to the dispatcher, eyes trained on them, and Dennis raises the gun.

    "You don't have anyone."

    "Small stature, brown hair, green eyes, he looks hurt-"

    "He's fine."

    "That missing child from- from-"

    "I'm from Philadelphia, bitch," Charlie says suddenly, eyes clearing.

    "And he's _ours!"_   Dennis yells, and fires the gun.

    Mac remembers being huddled under the bleachers with Dennis once, but the ones in the gym, where it's cramped and dark and dirty, and they didn't even have a smoke. Dennis had his arms wrapped around his legs and his chin on his knees, silent and carrying a heavy gloom with him as Mac worked on his poster for American History class, cutting out the head of President Harrison and clip-art of skulls and crossbones. Dennis absent-mindedly packed the paper heads and paper bones into a sandwich bag for Mac, glaring off into the gym class progressing around them, the missing of two kids in uniform short-shorts and knee-high socks gone unnoticed by the P.E. teacher.

    Tim Murphy jogged past, red-faced and sweaty, and Mac, knowing better, asked "Isn't that the guy who fucked your prom date the other night?" Dennis' face darkened further, knuckles bleaching on his curled fists.

    "He only fucked her because I wasn't standing my ground, 'cause I didn't give a shit about her anyway."

    Mac knew. He inched the scissors along the curved edge of another skull and crossbones, and Dennis shoved it into the bag too hard, creasing the paper.

    "Maybe at the senior prom I'll just kill him," he muttered. "Maybe I'll just fucking kill Tim, then he'll be sorry for humiliating me."

    "Yeah dude," Mac mumbled, wary. "Then he'll be sorry."

     Dennis loved it, tossed his arm over Mac's shoulders and even ran his hand up Mac's thigh, pretending to be interested in his crafts. But Mac wondered, if Dennis really did kill Tim Murphy at the senior prom and spilt punch all over his body so that nobody would know he was bleeding out until Dennis was long gone, if that would send Mac to Hell- for encouraging him when they sat under the bleachers and cut out skulls and crossbones and pictures of William Henry Harrison, who dropped dead of pneumonia thirty-two days into his presidency.

    The bullet misses the woman, misses her pretty far, almost like Dennis had aimed really terribly on purpose, and then they run. They run like they've been in cages their whole lives: Charlie in his mother's bathtub with his uncle blocking the door, Dee in a halo brace alone in her windowsill, Mac in a silent home and a silent church, and Dennis in his very own mind. They run like somebody finally left their cages unlocked.

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   "That was amazing," Mac breathes when they make it to the edge of the city, pacing in front of the others as they sit slumped against a brick wall between two apartments. "We were like action stars, man!" he lauds to no one in particular, giddy. They just shot a gun and fled a crime scene. Totally badass.

    "The pigs are gonna know we had something to do with that guy in the truck, and now they know we have Charlie-" Dee says, picking nervously at the skin of her lips.

    "Doesn't matter," says Dennis. "They can't catch us if we aren't in the country."

    "What?" Charlie gasps. "Where are we going? Can it be Alaska?"

    "Alaska's a state, Charlie," Mac says.

    Dennis stands up and brushes off his pants, walking steadfast deeper into Manhattan. "We're a few hundred miles from the Canadian border. All opposed?"

    Everyone shrugs. It isn't like they're leaving much behind.

    "Will we have to hunt moose to survive?" asks Charlie.

    "Maybe," Dennis answers, turning a corner onto a suddenly busy street, jerking Charlie's jacket hood over his head to cover his face from passersby.

    Charlie smacks his lips. "Alright."

    Dennis yanks open the door to a thrift shop and cringes when a bell jingles noisily overhead, ushering his following ducklings inside and initiating a huddle.

    "We need disguises," he says, low, as they all touch foreheads. "Do you all know how to shoplift?"

    Mac nods quickly. Practically everything he owns is stolen. Charlie just likes to help Mac when the family toaster breaks or his last good pair of jeans loses its zipper, and Dee's a bored rich girl, so she simply grins. Finally, something Dennis isn't good at.

    "We need to split up, look less suspicious. Dee, you take Charlie," Dennis delegates with a wave of his hand.

    "Why do I have to take the nutter?"

    "I'm not a nutter," Charlie protests.

    "Charlie, don't act like a nutter," Dennis sighs, and Dee starts to creep her way toward the back of the store, so the nutter follows. Mac turns on Dennis and raises an eyebrow.

    "Why'd you put them together? He just tried to kill her back there."

    Dennis pulls Mac behind a tall rack of used clothes with a gentle hand on his lower back, and then frames Mac's chin between his thumb and index finger. "Because you're acting strange," he whispers, "and I don't need you jeopardizing the mission. Talk to me."

   Mac frowns as Dennis searches his eyes. "I'm not-"

    "You aren't acting like yourself, Mac," Dennis insists, moving his palm along Mac's jaw. Mac knows he's being manipulated even as his knees shake and his head floats at the touch, and allows himself to be bent anyway. "You haven't said a word about sin today, so if you've lost faith in God's justice and are thinking of turning us in I need to know."

    "I wouldn't do that," Mac says.

    "Wouldn't you?"

    "No!" he whisper-shouts, shoving Dennis away from him. "And fuck you for thinking I would."

    Dennis raises his eyebrows in surprise, then turns to a rack of sunglasses and tries on a pair, tucks two more into his jacket pocket, and hands Mac one of his own. They face each other, eyes hidden behind dark lenses.

    "Do you still believe in God?" Dennis asks.

    "Yeah," answers Mac. "I guess I just don't care what He thinks anymore."

    "Good," Dennis says, and then kisses Mac like they're fugitives on the run.

    Their lips move in tandem, Dennis' soft and cold against Mac's chapped and warm, and their breath fogs up the inside of their glasses which click together as they try to press closer, as Mac walks Dennis into a rack of clothes and slams his back against the wood-paneled wall.

    "How long," Mac gasps, tilting his head back as Dennis grips his hips and drags his lips over his jaw, down his neck. He needs to know that it wasn't an hour ago when Mac neglected to pray, or a day ago when Mac killed a man. Though he isn't sure he'd stop Dennis from kissing him even if it were.

    "Thirteen inches," Dennis answers between kisses, digging his fingers into the skin under Mac's waistband.

    "Very funny," pants Mac, as Dennis moves his hands over Mac's stomach beneath his shirt and kisses him on the mouth again, long and surprisingly soft, a touch that feels a lot like relief, like gratitude.

    "Ever since I saw you at that party," Dennis answers earnestly, voice low and even, controlled, sane. "I never really liked weed, you know." He runs the tips of his fingers across Mac's cheeks and threads them into his hair, and Mac closes his eyes, throat rolling. "Liked you, though."

    Mac pulls Dennis' hands from under his shirt and intertwines their fingers, and swears he hears a click, like a key into the perfect lock, with something trapped inside finally being freed. "Always liked you," Dennis murmurs.

    Once, Dennis had called the landline and Mac twisted the cord around his finger as his friend asked to come over and bum a smoke. Mac had waited on the front porch for an hour, crossing his arms this way and that, kicking one foot up on the siding of the house and putting it back down again, trying to find the most handsome way to lean.

    When Dennis showed up and sat on the edge of Mac's dresser in wait, Mac realized he was out of weed, and braced himself for his friend to leave. Dennis only shrugged and flicked the radio on, got to talking about his day, asking about Mac's, and they gossiped well into the night about Adriano Calvanese being a jackass and Dennis' stupid sister named Sweet Dee. Dennis danced while he spoke, swaying and bobbing and spinning to a Prince song, and held out a hand to Mac, who took it with his heart in his throat. Dennis pressed their chests together and held Mac's hands, and Mac pressed his mouth to Dennis' shoulder, absently watching the closet door as they swayed together, lamplight pouring over their shuffling feet as darkness spilled in from the window. For once, they were sober the whole time, and Dennis never seemed to be able to wipe that little smile off his face.

   _Let's make it last forever,_

_for a hundred times won't be enough._

_Tonight is the night for making slow love._

   "I'm not gay," Mac reminds him, unwinding their fingers and resting his arms over Dennis' shoulders.

   "Okay," Dennis says, jerking him closer by his beltloops. "Whatever, Mac."

   The doorbell jingles and the two of them turn their heads to look out of the store's front display window just as Charlie in a purple bob wig and Dee in a fedora race past. Mac grabs Dennis' hand and yanks him out of the door, and they run after their friends as the shop owner screams and shakes his fist at them, the two of them laughing all the way.

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   They find a place to camp out for the night in a park when the orange sun goes down behind the edge of the Earth, and Dennis cups dried brush between his fingers over a bit of wood and Mac works on lighting it, blushing when their knuckles touch, and Dennis grins, shaking his head.

    "What do you want to do when we get to Canada, Dee?" Charlie asks, resting on his balled up coat as the two of them stare up at the stars through their sunglasses. He pushes a bit of pretty pale purple hair out of his face and glances over to the side to look at Dee.

    "I'm gonna go to Vancouver, be a makeup artist for the T.V. shows. I always wanted to work in the film industry, you know," she says, crossing her arms over her chest as she traces the stars.

    "Why don't you be an actress?" Charlie asks, squinting and tracing a constellation that he's surely made up.

    "Me?" Dee asks, turning her gaze toward the side of Charlie's face. "You think I could?"

    "Yeah!" exclaims Charlie. "You're tall and pretty, you could totally do it. Even with that crazy back brace. You could be in a robot movie."

    Dee's face pinkens as she averts her stare back to the night sky, hugging herself a little tighter. "Thanks, Charlie."

    Mac quirks an eyebrow at Dennis, who simply shrugs and rolls his eyes. "Let the little freaks be in love," he whispers. "God knows they'll never find anybody else."

    The fire, once started, is small and hardly warm, so the four of them all curl up together to sleep. Mac sleeps better on the ground on the outskirts of Manhattan to the sound of his friends' snores than he ever did in his bed at home.

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    Mac wakes to a foot nudging his ribs.

    "Hey," says a man's voice, a man's voice that he's never heard. "What are you kids doing out here?"

    He blinks sleepily, squinting against the white morning light. He sits up and is looking at a pair of blue trousers, moves his gaze higher to a badge, a stern face, a flat-billed hat.

    "Camping, officer," Dennis says groggily, stretching until his bones crack. Mac notices a police car parked at the top of the hill by the highway, and makes sure Charlie's still sleeping facedown in his purple wig.

    "Well, you can't camp out here. What's in the bag?"

    He jerks his chin at Mac's black backpack under Dennis' head, and Mac's eyes widen.

    "You don't have a warrant," he says.

    "Mac, it's okay," Dennis says, having already switched on the charm. "If he wants to find nothing in there then we'll just respect the requests of this nice officer." Just last week Dennis mentioned beating the shit out of the pig who gave him a speeding ticket. He moves to hand the bag to the cop, and Mac reaches out to intercept to no avail as the officer snatches it away.

    "I do not consent to a search! I do not consent to a search!" Mac repeats desperately, trying to physically pull the bag back from the cop, who pushes him away and turns his back on them.

    "It's your friend's bag and he consents," the officer says gruffly, unzipping the bag, pausing, and then turning to smile over his shoulder. "What do we have here?"

   Mac closes his eyes and tilts his face toward the sky as the officer pulls out a Ziploc and dangles it in front of him.

    "Mac..." Dennis says dangerously, as Dee's eyes widen, her hand still flattened on Charlie's back to keep him facing down.

    He had only brought it in case they really needed some cash, it wasn't even that much, he brought it in case of an emergency, he wasn't just being stupid, he-

   The officer tucks the ounce of weed under his arm and says "I'm afraid you'll have to come with me, young man," wrapping a hand around Dennis' bicep and pulling him to his feet, and Dennis' eyes dart down and back up with panic in them. The black grip of a handgun peeks out from his waistband, taunting.

    "Wait!" Mac says, and scrambles up to wrap Dennis in a hug. He slips a hand between them and transfers the gun from Dennis to himself, wedging it underneath his waistband and shirt where it presses cold against his lower back. Dennis visibly deflates, nodding his head against Mac's shoulder. _Well done._

    "It's my weed," Mac says to the officer.

    "No it isn't," Dennis sighs.

    "It's MY weed!" Dee calls out, hand shooting up.

    "No, it's _MY_ weed!" Charlie cries, muffled against the ground.

    They chant "It's my weed! It's my weed! It's my weed!" until the officer blows a whistle around his neck and prompts startled silence.

    "Heartwarming, really," he sneers, "but that only works in movies and with more than four people. Now I really don't want to shove all you kids into my backseat over an ounce of marijuana, so when I walk off with your friend here, the rest of you better be gone when I turn around again."

   Dennis glances back only once as the officer pats him down, cuffs him, mirandizes him, and walks him up the hill, locking eyes with Mac as the officer places a hand on his head and pushes him into the cop car.

   The door slams shut just as the three of them find a bush to duck behind and the very last ember in their little campfire dies, and the car peels off onto the highway until they can't see it anymore.

   Funny, Mac thinks, that they could take three lives, and then go down for a baggie full of weed.

   Maybe Charlie was right. God's a dick.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wuh oh! fuck 12!
> 
> mac & dennis' song: https://youtu.be/2H2O4WfBsCo
> 
> (thank u all for ur support and encouragement. had a lot of trouble getting this chapter out but went back to look at all ur comments and Bolstered My Confidence +50 points so thanks so much for the kudos and kind words love u, come see me @slugcities on twitter)


	6. chapter six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning for descriptions of graphic violence and mentioned rape / child sexual abuse

     They pry, ask him for his name and his address and a number of other things until Dennis wonders whether he should be dredging up family recipes for the giving. They take his fingerprints and point at dotted lines on which he signs his name, and then he's being led to a row of phones on the wall of the police station, one occupied by a hard-looking man who begs the other end of the line for money, and a teenage girl crying into the speaker of another.

   "You've got one phone call. Make it count," the officer says, crosses his big arms over his blue chest and frowns while Dennis stares blankly at the phone's curly cord.

   He can't call his parents for access to the family attorney, he'll lose his allowance for sure. Dennis unfolds the Sprinkles' Smoothies napkin in his pants pocket, jaw locked as he reads the number in Mac's chicken-scratch handwriting.

_212-327-8237._  
_Jack Kelly._  
_Attorney at Law._

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   He's notorious for getting troubled young boys off.

   Dennis should sit still and use his manners and let Jack Kelly and his sweaty mustache and his squeaky leather gloves get his charges dropped. He should.

   When they're in a little room alone and Dennis is resting his head on the cold metal table and a security camera's blinking red eye is bearing down on him and Uncle Jack adjusts his ugly brown tie which matches his ugly brown suit, he knows he should try and be good.

   "So this officer searched your bag without your consent?"

   He really should.

   "Mr. Reynolds?" says the lawyer in that stupid mousy little voice of his. "Mr. Reynolds, I know you're going through a lot right now but we need to communicate if I'm going to be your attorney. Now, consent to search from your friend is not consent from-"

   He really, really should.

   "You like that word, don't you?" he murmurs, flicking his eyes up to stare into Jack's. "Consent."

   "I'm sorry?"

   "Tell me, Uncle Jack," Dennis carries on, voice dropping to a low whisper. "When you rape your little nephew, do you worry this much about consent?"

   "Now that's a bold accusation. A very- very wrong and bold accusation." That sweaty mustache is near glistening, beads roll from his retreating hairline down to the dip of his temple, his temple that Dennis would love to smash with a hammer, dig his fingers into the spindling cracks and shatter his skull like an oyster's shell.

   "I was gonna kill you, you know," Dennis hisses, as Uncle Jack glances nervously at the security camera, as his eyes dart to the door. "I was gonna shoot you in your stupid fucking head."

   Uncle Jack swallows. "Are- are you still going to?"

   Dennis thinks first of grabbing the ink pen out of the lawyer's gloved hand and driving it into his neck, wrenching it out as blood sputters from his throat like a broken fountain, all over his papers and the table and his ugly brown suit, on Dennis' hands and his clothes and his face, thinks of staring right into the camera and licking it off of his fingers and off of his lips just for the theatrics of it all.

   He thinks second of Mac.

   He thinks of kissing Mac, of fucking Mac, of dancing with Mac, singing with him, laughing, fighting, watching movies and drinking beer and lighting candles and cooking dinner and opening up that bar they always talked about with Mac, of a white suit and a bouquet of flowers and a coffin with room for two and it makes his eyelids flutter and his toes curl and his stomach lurch.

   All Dennis ever wanted was to feel something. He thought breaking birds' necks and killing child molesters might fill that gaping hole inside him. It never really lasted.

   Mac, though- Mac always stuck around.

   "Get me out of here scot-free and I won't destroy your career," Dennis says at last. The lawyer nods quickly, soaking the collar of his hideous suit. "And if you ever lay a finger on Charlie again," he hisses, "my sister will light a match in your hair while you sleep, and then I'll cut your burnt body into perfect cubes and display them in a glass case on the front desk of your office. Understood?"

   Uncle Jack nods again, gathers his papers in a frenzy and rushes out of the room, still nodding to no one in particular, sweat forming an inkblot on his back.

   The security camera blinks obliviously as Dennis leans back in his chair and feels a brand new emotion wash over him. He thinks it's called peace.

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   When Dennis' hearing a few weeks later ties up in a matter of minutes over a sudden technical lack of usable evidence, he crawls into the passenger's seat of one of the many family cars and loosens his tie until he can breathe.

   "You're a lucky bastard," his father says, adjusting the rearview mirror for a height that seems to be shrinking more and more every minute. "A real Reynolds man, walking out of there squeaky clean like that."

   "Pulled a few strings," Dennis sighs, gazing out of the window as the courthouse inches away behind them.

   "Atta boy. Might even up your allowance for not making this such a pain in the ass like all your mother's hearings," answers Frank Reynolds, nodding sharply, and if Dennis had known that all it would take to win his father's approval was fucking the system he would've started grifting and blackmailing losers the minute he could say "diapey."

   Out of the window passes a barren park, three pigeons on an iron fence, a woman walking a poodle on a pink leash, and three teenagers sitting against the fence and passing a lit cigarette between them.

   "Let me out here," Dennis says, and starts to open the door before his father can argue.

   "I'm not your fucking chauffeur-" he begins, putting on the brakes enough that Dennis can fling his seatbelt off and slam the door shut behind him. The car pulls away without much of a second thought.

   Dee is too busy tying Charlie's sneaker laces to notice, but Mac takes another drag of the cigarette and grins, jumping to his feet and brushing any street residue off his very, very blue pants.

   "I like your pants," Dennis lies once he's close enough to whisper, and Mac's smile stretches to his ears. They're each dressed in some sort of sorry excuse for formalwear, Charlie in ripped jeans and a button-up with a lopsided bowtie, Dee in a wrinkled black dress that does nothing for her figure or lack thereof, and Mac in his best church clothes, except for those new blue pants that Dennis has a sinking feeling he'll have to see a lot more of.

   "We came to support you during your hearing but Charlie got nervous pretty much right away so we thought we'd just come wait outside," Mac explains, inching closer, that dopey smile still resting on his face.

   "Way too quiet in there, man," Charlie says, "I could like, hear everybody's thoughts."

   "Yeah, I'm sure it wasn't that my lawyer was your uncle," says Dennis, "who won't be bothering you anymore, by the way."

   Charlie swallows, nodding at the ground. "Okay." He rubs his arm long enough to become pitiful, and then chokes out, "Thanks, you guys," and then they're on him, foreheads pressed to foreheads, arms winding together, chests close, breaths mingling as they pretend Charlie isn't about to cry. "It's probably better that we didn't kill him, you know, because Mac would go to Hell."

   "Well, technically we would all go to Hell," Dee says somewhere inside of the hug.

   "We don't believe in God," Charlie retorts.

   "Mac's already going to Hell," Dennis argues, frowning as Mac flinches against him.

   "My queer Christian support group says a forgiving God would never banish his children to eternal punishment," Mac says, and Dennis is beginning to grow uncomfortable from bending over to hug Charlie and the cold bars of Dee's brace squashing the side of his face, but doesn't let go.

   "What about the Bible?" asks Dee.

   "I'm pretty much agnostic now," explains Mac, and only now does Dennis realize how long he's been grounded, barricaded in his room with three dressers stacked up in the hall by his small, furious father. "Agnostic means-"

   "I know what fucking _agnostic_ means you prick," Dee snaps.

   "I don't," says Charlie, and Dennis closes his eyes.

   "Can we just go home?" he asks. "Please?"

   They all nod. "Yeah," says Mac. "Yeah, we can go home."

   It takes them a very long time to peel themselves apart, and they bump shoulders on the walk to Mac's house, trying to cram together on a sidewalk that's plenty big enough for the four of them.

   Dennis missed them. So much.

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   When they file up into Mac's bedroom and Charlie becomes instantly entranced by the television and Dee is distracted by Charlie's commentary on the program, Mac takes Dennis by the hand and pulls him into the bathroom and shuts the door behind him, loudly asking for help with the electric razor all the way.

   When they're fully inside Mac closes in on Dennis and backs him up against the counter, and Dennis puckers up his lips and closes his eyes, but nothing ever comes aside from Mac's warm hands on his face.

   "You sacrificed yourself for me," Mac says, eyes big like dinner plates. "You love me."

   "It was just some weed," Dennis answers.

   "You love me, Den," Mac says again, and pecks him on the lips.

   "I'd like to try having romantic relations with a man-"

   "You love me," he says once more, and kisses Dennis again.

   Dennis rolls his eyes, leaning far enough back that the mirror is cold on the back of his head and Mac can't reach his lips. He drops his hands from Dennis' face to the counter at his hips, effectively keeping him from going anywhere. Mac always did know how to keep people close, even the ones on strings floating up into space or with meteor shoes falling through the earth.

   "I love you," Dennis concedes, and there's no echo in his chest when he speaks. Mac's eyes brighten like two small suns and rather than kissing Dennis again he wraps him in a hug, and reminds Dennis that love with Mac is so much more. Love with Mac is family and friendship and religion. It's kind, it's long, it's simple. It's finding baby birds with broken wings and nursing them back to health. Dennis knows it might sicken him one day, but the thought of being in love with Mac thrills him too much to be practical, to be careful. To think or to love like a killer.

   "Are we still whacking Charlie's uncle?" Mac asks.

   "Is that what you want?" Dennis asks.

   Mac chews his lip, moving off of Dennis to cross his arms. Dennis stares at his horrible stick-and-poke feather tattoo. Maybe he'll take him to a parlor for his eighteenth birthday; get a real one. Then he could take him to get the undercut he's been wanting, and buy him some real pants. He could take care of Mac. He could love Mac for a long time.

   "It's just that we already put in so much work..." Mac sighs, and brings Dennis back to the present.

   "Alright," Dennis shrugs. "Yeah, just me and you this time."

   "Wait!" calls a muffled voice, and Dee, who had clearly been listening at the door the entire time, yanks the door open troublingly hard and throws her hands in the air as high as the aluminum shark tank allows. "Can we come too?"

   "No!" Mac screams, pulling the door closed, but Dee keeps an iron grip on it and looks mostly unbothered by Mac's relentless tugging, pouting her lips.

   "You owe me!" she argues. "I saved your asses at the wreck!"

   "Me too!" shouts Charlie. "When we were being kidnapped by that old man!"

   "No one was-!" Dennis starts, but feels the fight fizzle out midsentence. "Fucking fine, you two morons go get in Mrs. Mac's car. Mac, go put some of your melatonin in her soup."

   Mac salutes and the three of them scramble out of the room, and Dennis presses his forehead against the dirty mirror and takes a few deep breaths.

   (Slow Love plays on the radio in the bedroom, and a car starts in the driveway.)

   When Dennis Reynolds was seventeen years old, he was in love with a boy named Mac who only lied a little bit, had a sister who wore a metal back brace and finally had a boyfriend from St. Joseph's, a boyfriend who huffed glue in the bathroom only on holidays, and again had set out to kill a man.

   Although Mrs. Mac's car would run out of gas just short of Manhattan, and Dennis knew that. But he liked singing to FM radio with his best friends, and buying sunglasses and purple wigs, and letting Mac think he was using reverse psychology to share his McDonald's fries.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know u wanted uncle jack to die and i did too but i have a lot of love for the gang constantly pretending they're going to go kill uncle jack as an excuse to hang out with each other as if that isn't the most extreme fucking way of...
> 
> anyway
> 
> i love u all so dearly if u read this fic all the way through, and for all ur sweet sweet sweet comments that encouraged me to continue a very difficult fic and so much support for a fic that i thought was going to be too weird for consumption <33 i hope u enjoyed this final chapter and the story as a whole <3 thanks so much again !!!!
> 
> come see me @slugcities on twitter :)


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